Friday, January 1, 2010

Installing MIT Scratch on Kubuntu 9.10

Installing MIT Scratch on Kubuntu 9.10

Below are the steps to get Scratch working, including playing audio (recording quality is still quite poor, but you can always record outside of Scratch).

Install PulseAudio

$ aptitide install pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils

Install the latest squeak

The Squeak package included in Ubuntu 9.10 can't play audio (wav). Fortunately, the latest version (3.11.3.2135) works. So, go to http://www.squeakvm.org/unix to download the binary package. However, if you try to download the .deb package, it will say that you don't have the permission. So, download the rpm install and then convert it:

Install Scratch 1.4

Download the Scratch source from http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Source_Code. Unzip it and you will get the VM file ScratchSourceCode1.4.image. Before you can run it, you need to know that it relies on some "plugins" that are written in C language for each platform. So, download the source code to the plugins from that same page. Then compile them. The package contains three plugins: take one of the plugin called ScratchPlugin as an example: